Envestnet said Thursday it's accelerating the growth of its Data and Analytics business by launching the Wealth Data Platform, a cloud-based data intelligence solution for advisory firms.
The Wealth Data Platform enables advisors to connect and enrich all the data sources across their practices and provide their clients with actionable insights at scale, all on one platform, Envestnet said.
The platform's functionality was made possible through Envestnet's partnership with data cloud company Snowflake and its Powered by Snowflake program.
The enhanced platform "improves data access, time, and efficiency, giving research and analytics teams the tools they need to work more seamlessly on their platforms by knitting together separate capabilities such as valuation, client aggregations, advisor analytics and more," Envestnet noted.
UBS and Microsoft Expand Cloud Partnership
UBS and Microsoft on Thursday announced a significant expansion of their partnership to accelerate UBS's public cloud footprint over the next five years.
As part of the initiative, UBS expects to have more than 50% of its applications, including critical workloads, running on the Microsoft Azure service, now UBS's primary cloud platform.
Azure will "help advance UBS's sustainability initiatives, drive operational efficiencies, and maintain its standards for compliance and security — providing strong foundations on which to scale UBS's rate of cloud adoption," the firms said.
When UBS announced its cloud strategy in 2018, leveraging its strategic partnership with Microsoft, the wirehouse said it planned to move about 33% of its applications to the public cloud within four years. But UBS accomplished that goal early, in February 2021.
Now, the companies' partnership is expanding beyond just consuming cloud services to include the co-development of innovations and greater collaboration in areas including carbon reduction, they said.
In line with its sustainability goals, UBS continues to move certain technology platform workloads from its on-premises and private cloud servers to Azure. In some use cases, that has resulted in the energy consumption of those workloads to be reduced by as much as 30% to date, the firms said.
UBS and Microsoft are also "implementing and further exploring ways in which artificial intelligence and data can be used to enhance services for clients and employees." As an example, in Switzerland, UBS is currently operating two applications that use conversational AI capabilities to respond to client e-mail inquiries.
eMoney Announces Product Roadmap at Summit
Fidelity's eMoney Advisor announced new details of its product roadmap on Monday, day one of its 2022 eMoney Summit.
Head of Product Tom Sullivan, who joined eMoney in June, took the virtual stage during the annual conference for the first time to share the vision for the firm, identifying four main value creators of eMoney that he said help advisors create efficiencies and scale their practices.
Those value creators are financial planning; aggregation supporting planning efforts, providing a consolidated view of clients' financial picture; financial wellness; and professional services.
